Video Card

Customizing your computer can be a costly thing. Anyone who does it knows that. And, if you're a gamer, or someone who needs their computer to be the best on the planet, it can be downright ridiculous. Take, for example, the Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 TOXIC Edition, which is surely going to cost you somewhere in the ballpark of $700. But, at least it's the fastest video card on planet Earth. So, you get what you pay for.

Earlier this month ATI launched the most powerful professional level graphics card ever called the FirePro V8800. The downside to the powerful video card was the huge price tag of $1499. ATI has now unveiled new pro video cards that offer less performance than the V8800, but are cheaper as well.

I have been a PC gamer for a long time and when NVIDIA first rolled out its SLI technology, I was pumped to see the benefits that you got in video games using multiple cards. Over the years, NVIDIA has improved the tech and you can use up to four of some of the companies cards in SLI today.

Most video cards use fans to keep the GPU and circuit boards running nice and cool. If you have multiple video cards in your PC or high-end cards that generate lots of heat, the noise from the fan can drive you crazy.

There have been stories and posts running rampant over the last week or so online after word leaked out that one of the new and cool XFX HD 5970 Black Edition Limited video cards had turned up online for sale. As the story went, the video card was one of 1000 made with an individual serial number.

NVIDIA's Fermi-based GeForce GTX 470/480 cards are on sale now, but according to analysts the rumored yield issues have seriously impacted availability. X-bit labs quotes analysts Needham and Company, who believe NVIDIA's Fermi yield is just 20 to 30-percent, and that they currently have just 10,000 chips on the market. Financially, the analysts believe NVIDIA could "lose market share" from 2H 2010, claiming to have discovered from their channel checks that Fermi "is not ramping well" and could in fact face further product delays.

Video cards are used for more than just playing games. They are used in HTPC machines for better graphics and video and they are often used in machines for video and audio editing too. When you are using a video card in a HTPC often, you want components that are very quiet so they don’t disrupt the movie you are watching.

One NVIDIA GTX 480 graphics card is potent; two are impressive and three, in SLI setup, is probably overkill for all but the most avid (and deep pocketed) of gamers. So, what do you call four GTX 480 boards in a single machine? CyberPower Inc. have apparently been experimenting with the EVGA GTX 480, showing a new quad-card rig on their Facebook page.

AMD have outed their latest graphics card, and the ATI FirePro V8800 has set its sights on your workstation. Described as "the most powerful professional graphics card ever created", the V8800's 1600 stream processors offer 2.6 teraflops of power with 147.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth; a single card can drive four 30-inch displays and - if paired with the ATI FirePro S400 Synchronization Module - those panels can all be synchronized, too.

NVIDIA has recently unveiled its first Fermi video cards with the GTX 480 and GTX 470 getting official on March 26. As with any new and high-end video card, the things aren’t cheap or quiet. The beasts also eat lots of power.